Pig farms already collect data from many sensors, but most use them one at a time. A Harper Adams University student has shown that combining those streams through machine learning can predict disease better than any single source, work that has won him the 2026 Nick Bird Award, Pig World reports.
Declan Parker, a farmer's son from Lancashire, evaluated machine-learning models built on fused sensor data for disease prediction in a commercial nursery pig unit for his Masters in Engineering. He tested whether combining several sensors on a large pig farm could pick up early signs of disease more effectively than one sensor alone.
"Most farms use these sensors separately or struggle to turn raw data into something useful," Parker said. "My study found that fused data sets, combining multiple sources, consistently outperformed single-source models, particularly water-only models. This suggests acoustic, water, environmental and management data all carry complementary information, and combining them correctly can predict disease better than any one source alone."
He was careful about the limits: the data came from a single farm, so the results are not fully conclusive. But he said the work highlights the potential of smarter data use to raise productivity and welfare on pig farms. Parker has since joined Jace Supplies Ltd, a dairy engineering company in Staffordshire, where he will apply the knowledge in practice.
The award, a perpetual trophy and a £500 cheque, was set up by the Reading-based energy specialist Farmex in memory of its director Nick Bird, who died in 2013 after 17 years working on real-time monitoring of pig production. It goes to written work that records observations of an agricultural process, analyses and interprets the data, and shows clear added value for farmers.
"This is a really excellent piece of work and very much in line with where data use has to go, getting AI to do the analytical graft," said Farmex director Hugh Crabtree. "Commercial realisation of the full potential value from data is still lagging behind. It is clear to the judges that AI is definitely the way forward."
Photo: Lewis Clarke / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Source: Pig World
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